Xi Jinping Confronts the Network Society

Abstract

Xi Jinping’s radical reconcentration of power is widely seen as a watershed development in the history of PRC politics. Xi’s effort can be interpreted from an international relations perspective as a complex “securitization move” in which an elite figure defines some trend, tendency, or other development as a security threat so severe that it becomes necessary to deploy special, extraordinary measures to address it. But what in China’s case was the perceived threat or configuration of threats that Xi could use to justify his reconcentration of power? Analysis of articles published in neibu (internal-circulation-only) policy journals from 2012 through 2015 reveals a primary concern among members of the broader CCP elite to be a threat to the stability and integrity of the political order itself resulting from the dislocations caused by trying to fuse a Leninist political system with what was, by 2010, a well-developed network society.